Why are so many indigenous Pando people dying? Using observations from Chhattisgarh, India, to conduct structural assessment and identify solutions

Health challenges of communities are often assessed using biomedical or individual risk-based frameworks which are often inadequate for understanding their full extent. We use observations from the global South to demonstrate the usefulness of structural assessment to evaluate a public health problem and spur action. Following newspaper reports of excessive deaths in the marginalised indigenous or Adivasi community of the Pando people in Northern Chhattisgarh in central India, we were asked by the state government's public health authorities to identify root causes of these deaths. In this rapidly evolving situation, we used a combination of public health, social medicine, and structural vulnerability frameworks to conduct biomedical investigation, social inquiry, and structural assessment. After biomedical investigations, we identified scrub typhus, a neglected tropical disease, as the most likely cause for some of the deaths which was unrecognised by the treating physicians. In the social inquiry, the community members identified the lack of Adivasi status certificates, education, and jobs as the three major social factors leading to these deaths. During the structural assessment of these deaths, we inductively identified the following ten structures- political, administrative, legal, economic, social, cultural, material, technical, biological, and environmental. We recommended improving the diagnosis and treatment of scrub typhus, making the hospitals more friendly for Adivasi people, and tracking the health status of the Adivasi communities as some of the measures. We suggest that a combination of biomedical, social,and structural assessments can be used to comprehensively evaluate a complex public health problem to spur action..